Syria’s Aleppo Claim Disputed by Reports Rebels Fight On

Free Syrian Army opposition fighters battle government security forces during the siege of the Shaar district police station in the northern Syrian city of Aleppo on July 25, 2012. Photographer: Pierre Torres/AFP/Getty Images

July 31 (Bloomberg) -- Syria’s army has “purged” Aleppo’s
Salaheddine district of armed groups and is pursuing others in
several neighborhoods as it tries to regain control of the city,
state television said.

Al Arabiya television and Al Jazeera, which had a news crew
in the Salaheddine district, reported that the area was still
under rebels’ control. An Al Jazeera correspondent in Aleppo,
Omar Khashram, was injured by mortar fire and brought for
treatment to Turkey, where he was reported in stable condition.

Troops loyal to President Bashar al-Assad have been
battling rebels who seized several neighborhoods in Aleppo,
Syria’s most populous city and its commercial hub, since last
week. Government forces shelled districts of the city held by
rebels and clashes took place in the early morning in the
neighborhoods of al-Maysir and al-Iza’a, the Syrian Observatory
for Human Rights said on its Facebook page.

An officer interviewed by the state-run TV channel said
“mercenaries” from other countries, including Yemen, Saudi
Arabia and Turkey, were helping the rebels in Aleppo.

Aleppo, with a population the U.S. Central Intelligence
Agency estimates at 3 million, is shaping up as the biggest test
yet of opposition fighters’ capabilities against Assad’s
artillery and air power.

Motee al-Bateen, a member of the executive committee of the
Syrian National Council, the main opposition group, said he
couldn’t confirm whether Salaheddine was recaptured by the army.

“How much territory the opposition holds is not
important,” he said by telephone from Istanbul yesterday.
“What’s important is to engage the troops in cycles of attack
and retreat to exhaust them.”

City Shelled

Al-Bateen said the army was using mortars, rocket launchers
and tanks to shell areas and avoid engaging rebels in close
combat.

International and regional efforts have failed to end the
violence in Syria, which began in March 2011 and has left more
than 19,000 people dead, including 5,000 government troops,
according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an
opposition group.

Syrian state forces killed 85 people yesterday, mainly in
the capital, Damascus, and Aleppo, according to an e-mailed
statement by the Local Coordination Committees, an opposition
group. Thirty-two Syrian soldiers died in fighting yesterday,
the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said in an e-mailed
statement.

Lieutenant General Babacar Gaye, head of the United Nations
observer mission in Syria, said he is “deeply concerned” about
the violence in Aleppo.

UN Attacked

Gaye said that on his first field visit, he went to Homs
province July 29. The city of Rastan there was heavily damaged
by “an intensive shelling campaign and fierce fighting,” he
told a news conference in Damascus yesterday, according to
remarks e-mailed by his office. “There were damaged tanks left
on the side of the streets, public infrastructure, such as
bridges, was destroyed and homes on the main roads inside the
town were largely damaged.”

More than 12 UN armored vehicles were attacked and
destroyed in Syria as violence spread throughout the country, UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told reporters in New York
yesterday.

“It is quite fortunate that nobody got injured by these
attacks,” Ban said. “It was only because of these armored
vehicles, which protected our mission.” The mission of UN
unarmed observers is being dismantled after a cease-fire
agreement failed to take hold.

Oppressive Acts

The U.K. Foreign Office said Syria’s charge d’affaires,
Khaled al-Ayoubi, has left his post in the Syrian Embassy in
London, saying he is unwilling to represent “a regime that has
committed such violent and oppressive acts against its own
people,” the Foreign Office said in an e-mailed statement
yesterday. He was the most senior Syrian diplomat serving in
London, it said.

About 200,000 people have fled Aleppo and nearby areas in
the past two days, Valerie Amos, the UN’s top humanitarian
affairs official, said in a statement July 29. The security
situation in cities and along main transport routes is hindering
humanitarian agencies’ efforts to reach displaced families, she
said.

“It’s pretty clear that Aleppo is another tragic example
of the kind of indiscriminate violence that the Assad regime has
committed against its own people,” U.S. Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta told reporters July 29 on his plane as he began a five-day Mideast trip. “If they continue this kind of tragic attack
on their own people, it’ll ultimately be a nail in Assad’s
coffin.”

Saudi officials and citizens donated almost 406 million
riyals ($108 million) by the seventh day of the Saudi National
Campaign to Support the Brothers in Syria, which was ordered by
King Abdullah, state-run Saudi Press Agency said yesterday.